This blog is a random walk down an internet street. My Thoughts as a corporate web strategist. for a large F500 company.
Some Props to the Wife's Web Site: GetPerception.com
It’s alive! We’re finally rolling Ed out…huzzah!
ACEdge
Last month I posted about how we were implementing the mindset, and rigor, usually associated with traders or portfolio managers on Wall St. to our Account Executives/AM’s for their online marketing efforts. Well, we are one month in and making great strides! Today, not only did we implement and test everyone on the concepts and metrics around a Portfolio Improvement Index (basically an index of Revenue and Spend achievement vs. Orders) but introduced how we will shortly be introducing the notion of Risk as a mathmatical element in deal negotiating! Word.
Fantastic results: we are seeing more clearly which deals are profitable and which aren’t, and which partners introduce more volatility to our performance. I will be so excited, if we can actually achieve a perspective of online marketing such that we can create and effective Index for the overall internet and then, of course, be able to evaluate the Alpha and Beta of a particular partner, deal, placement or even creative! Can you imagine?
Ta-dow! (or should I say, Ta-DOW?:-)
Stay tuned for more results…
ACEdge
O.K. not really #368. I wish I had the time to post all the gory details of our emerging attempts at cultivating a community on (and off) YouTube. But, unfortunately, I also need to actually spend time *cultivating* said community:-). However, as some of you know by now, we have some new media assets available to compliment our wonderfully (or alarmingly, depending on your view point) catchy commercials.
One of these *new* assets involves Ed McMahon describing in rythmic detail, all his credit problems and how it nearly ruined his “golden years”. OK, some spin there. He really raps. And, it’s kinda funny, and kinda related to credit! how’s that?
But, it has nothing to do with our commercials and cover song contest (http://www.youtube.com/freecreditreport shameless plug). So, what does a social media novice do?
Well, we’ve decided to integrate him in some of our creative and channel page, and we’re going to cross-link the sites (www.freecreditreportband.com & www.freecreditreportsongs.com ). Hopefully, we won’t confuse the heck out of the 1500+ contest participants we have. We have coined the term “ensemble” marketing, and we hope this Jazz inspired approach of cacophony marketing, will elevate all levels of awareness and engagement, without thoroughly convincing our growing followers that we are nuts! (Which is true, but not pertinent).
More to follow…we’ll post “Ed” on Tuesday 10/14, which is exactly mid-way through our contest which ends 10/31…so we should be able to measure any pops we get. He’ll also be on some National TV, so we’ll be measuring offline to online…interested? You can also follow along with us on twitter for more “real-time” stats… www.twitter.com/ACEdge .
A
I’ve been working on a few contests lately, and have been thinking about trying to leverage the power of Micro-blogging to raise the awareness of charities and my brand simultaneously.
Thanks to Shannon Paul’s post: http://shannonpaul.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/learn-the-rules-so-you-can-break-them-well/
I have new ideas on leveraging Twitter to encourage folks to identify with a charity publicly and have my firm count replies with the “winners” receiving a donation from my firm after a period of time. Seems like a great way to “give back” while encouraging more conversation. I plan on reaching out to twitter to see if it would be possible to work on a new tag that could be auto-inserted on replies to make it easy for folks (so they don’t need to think about their charity score until it’s over). Thoughts? Anyone else doing something like this? Let me know…
ACEdge
“The Inconsistent Agency is neither evil nor ignorant but has yet to make an agencywide commitment to understanding the new rules of marketing.”
[Editor: Fantastic! Though I also want to coin the phrase The Inconsisteny Enterprise: Without commitment, always looking to “tell the story” instead of letting it unfold, yet eager to try the newest channel…once. Ugh.] ACEdge
So, our contest launched successfully on Monday (9/29)…along with over 400 comments on the video lead in page, we’ve received over 1100 channel subscribers and 27K channel views. We’ve a long way to go to keep the contest chatter interesting, and of course, keep spreading the word, but it seems we are off to a good start.
Our one and only requirement was to “have fun”, which is probably the best way for a large brand like ours to start testing User-generated media; but we’re also getting a lot of requests to extend our presence into other social areas…so we’ll see…
Technically, the Google/YouTube team have been great to work with, and the Analytics provided (for free) a welcome addition. Still, would like to see more case studies and or data on promotion “outside” of the network. We’re embarking on that now, so I will certainly relay what we “find” out on twitter, FF, FB, Myspace, et al…
Wish us luck..
ACEdge
On the eve of our large YouTube Video Cover song contest, I just wanted to give a shout out to the guys who really burned oil to pull this off (lawyers notwithstanding). We leveraged two groups…Saforian (www.saforian.com) for the YT channel page design, and creative direction for the micro-site (thanks Todd!) and Royal Pink Productions (www.royalpinkproductions.com) for the lead in video ad, as well as overall spiritual guidance and community moderation, many thanks Halcyon!
I, for one, certainly could not have done it without them, and interestingly, in my humble servant opinion, neither could my company. Despite our enormous online resources this is still a new area for us, with various challenges (we’re .Net [I have no idea why] and these things seem much easier to pull off with OS/PHP) and these “side projects” have odd timelime needs. I’ve talked a lot about how web 2.0, in my opinion, means for large enterprises the need to establish a “forward recon” team—capable of exploring all the “nooks & crannies” of technologies and ideas in order to find the most promising. But, it is even more true when exploration turns into “micro-execution” and / or real testing.
So, wish us luck on our this new chapter…I will feed some results of the contest as we get them…
ACEdge
Within any large company different agendas compete. No different where I work. One of the ideas that was batted around was leveraging celebrities who had gotten into financial trouble as spokepersons for our brand. Not a shabby idea. And, our first effort (psst…Ed McMahon) I thought was hilarious.
Still, there is the little manner of “releasing” such content. I prefer a more robust social media strategy where we engage with users *beforehand*, talk about our efforts *beforehand* and even share a little (or a lot) of what we’ve done right, what we screwed up, etc…I even prefer seeking feedback as we create assets and information to help guide its creation. Seems very consistent with “Web 2.0” to me…
Not so to others here. Fair enough. Develop in a vacuum and *hope* it resonates. I suppose, if it is truly creative and compelling it will. But, still seems like we miss out on authenticity of community and it generating that true sense of connection with our brand. Here, many seem to think a win is if a blogger blogs about us. To me it seems a win is getting the community to “comment” about us and engage with us, regardless of channel. We still seem to be focused on “uni-directional” messaging.
On the brighter side, it isn’t cheap to create “compelling” short film, and brands (ignoring the immediate gut gringe of commercialism) can act as a producer of (last?) resort.
Will keep you posted on whether we created an egg or started a new chicken…stay tuned!
ACEdge
So, we were really hoping to launch a behind the scenes blog of our upcoming YouTube contest, so we could *contribute* to the understanding of F500 using social media…but, alas, after it was approved…then rejected…then approved again…it was killed because it didn’t “fit” the brand.
Sad. I guess talking about what we *don’t know* and what we “think we know” in social media marketing, the mistakes we’ve made and the good things we’ve done to get this entire contest up and running is not *suitable* for our brand. Ugh! I guess I’ll need to confine myself to discussing my personal wins and failures as the “project steward”! :-).
Look for us, going forward on the “official” site blog at www.freecreditreportband.com and of course on Youtube itself at www.youtube.com/freecreditreport.
And, come back here for some “personal” commentary…;-)
ACEdge
We’ve gotten our intro “ad” initial cuts
http://styn.net/client/fcr/video/FCRv3_H264_Medium.wmv
and the micro-site to support it all is in version 2 in staging…
http://freecreditreportband.saforian.com/
just some final polishing and we should be able to work on the how we are going to give away so many t-shirts and ringtones with little to no “staff” help!
You can follow along with all our bumps and bruises in our behind the scenes blog if you like:
http://www.behind.freecreditsong.com/2008/
ACEdge
